Live from New York

A rainy day in New York - as seen from the HBO headquarters

It’s been a long while since I’ve blogged, and for good reason I guess:  I’ve been working my tail off finishing the film, BIG JOY: The Adventures of James Broughton.

And we’re almost there – what a triumph and a relief.  It will be released next year, just in time for Broughton’s Centennial!  At the same time, how sad.  You work on a film for four years, molding and shaping it, creating and then “killing your children” as you edit out scenes.  And once it’s “in the can” (one of many gloriously outdated expressions in filmmaking), you can’t change anything. 

We ritually gave birth to the film last month, all 82 minutes of it, at the annual Summer Gathering of Radical Faeries at Breitenbush Hot Springs in Detroit, Oregon.  It was apt and poetic that we staged a sneak preview of our work-in-progress there.  For it was there that I met James Broughton in 1989, at a winter gathering of Radical Faeries; we were assigned to the same cabin.

I had seen a few of his films 10 years earlier when I stumbled into them at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  There, I was transfixed by his visions of a world where things are perfect after the fuddy-duddies get overturned, nudity is natural, humor hugged and contradictions embraced.

Now, it seems, all but a small number of experimental film freaks and poetry aficionados have forgotten about Broughton.  Hence, this film. 

Here’s how we described it in some 24 meetings we had during Independent Film Week September 16-20 in New York:  “Big Joy is a documentary about living your passions and becoming the person of your dreams, disguised as an inspiring biopic about the wild and crazy California filmmaker and poet James Broughton.”

On September 17, people got to see 20 minutes of BIG JOY

Independent Film Week, organized by our favorite filmmaker support organization, the IFP (Independent Filmmaker Project), is an annual marketplace where emerging filmmakers get to pitch their works-in-progress to various industry executives and festival programmers.  I also went there last year with the multimedia Big Joy Project, when the film was still in “rough assembly” stage.  This year, we had an almost-finished film to show, and the response was encouraging.

We met with HBO in their beautiful headquarters in midtown Manhattan, and were able to hand our film to Sheila Nevins, known as the Goddess of Documentaries at HBO.  We also met with American Documentary/POV, Strand Releasing, Motto Films, and with many fine festivals including Sundance, Tribeca, Frameline, NewFest and Hot Docs.

It really helps to have a finished piece of the film to show.  In our case, we showed a 20-minute preview and for the Labs Showcase we showed the first three and a half minutes.  Readers of this blog can watch it via a sneak preview here:

http://vimeo.com/ericslade/bigjoyopen
the password is: james

We were astounded when each of the 20 films in the IFP 2012 Labs (10 documentaries and 10 narrative films) got to show 4 minutes, and our film got a rousing response.  One filmmaker even told me, “This inspires me to go back tonight and edit my film with even more creativity than I thought possible.”

A scene from Big Joy (from Broughton's film Erogeny) - as seen on the big screen outside at the  IFP Labs Showcase presented by Rooftop Films

A reporter from the Daily Mail of London posted a blog report saying she loved being “seduced by the silly” in the Big Joy clip.

We’re now in a waiting period to see which festivals accept the film, while we continue raising money for finishing, marketing, and distribution.

Eric Slade's film about Harry Hay, Hope Along the Wind, showed at the Radically Gay conference

Co-director/producer Eric Slade and I also participated in a conference the following week at City University of New York, NYU, and the Gay & Lesbian Center called “Radically Gay:  The Life and Visionary Legacy of Harry Hay.”    It was an interesting mixture of academic, fun, and faerie events celebrating the founder of the first national gay organization in the U.S., the Mattachine Society, who also “co-founded” the Radical Faeries.

The view from Alan and Andrea's house on Martha's Vineyard

That, plus a marvelous visit to Martha’s Vineyard, where I was hosted by my friends Alan and Andrea Rabinowitz, made for an exciting and exhausting three weeks on the East Coast.

At last, a bit of a rest!